Open University Research Highlights Brochure 2011

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WELCOME

Within a few years we will possess the technology to secure all our mobile communications, be able to predict infectious disease outbreaks, and learn what a comet and its tail are made of.

These are just a few areas of research at The Open University (OU) that contribute to our knowledge and our quality of life. We have a wide-reaching and vibrant research and enterprise portfolio, competing with the best in the world.

The Open University is ranked in the top third of UK higher education institutions for the quality of its research, as determined by the last national Research Assessment Exercise in 2008. Half of our research was assessed as either world-leading or internationally excellent.

The University’s links with business and industry are well documented in these pages, and we are proud of the increasing number of institutions approaching us to join collaborative projects. Whilst we are often best known for our teaching, it is our high quality research that underpins this.

Alan Bassindale Pro Vice Chancellor, Research and Enterprise

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CONTENTS

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Education

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Environment

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Health

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Science

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Society

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Untitled About OU research

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EDUCATION OU research in education and technology connects innovation and expertise in learning and teaching to change the face of education. This is at the heart of the University’s mission to be a world leader in the design, content and delivery of supported open and distance learning through the innovative use of technology.

Bringing fieldwork into the lab School children often say learning science is boring as it has all been done before, but using novel touch technologies to connect field and laboratory students the ‘Out There and In Here’ project proved existing British Geological Survey maps were incorrect.

One of the benefits of mobile technologies is to combine ‘digital’ (e.g. data, photos) with ‘field’ experiences in novel ways that are contextualised by people’s current activities. However, cost, mobility disabilities and time constraints often exclude students from engaging in such peripatetic experiences.

The ‘Out There and In Here’ (OTIH) project explores the use of mobile and tabletop technologies to support collaborative learning.

The project team led by Anne Adams of the OU’s Institute of Educational Technology (IET) is working to show how OTIH develops interconnected user-friendly touch systems in tables, iPads and phones that can seamlessly connect and support co-discovery for students who might be up a mountain or in a museum with those inside a laboratory or in their home.

A key moment in the findings came when students in the field realised, while discussing information from the laboratory, that the British Geological Survey map was ‘wrong’ and their research had proved it.

The research will benefit: • Practitioners, in developing approaches to teaching and learning • Students, with more engaging and effective methods for learning • Technology and learning designers, developing appropriate systems for student situations.

The project team includes the OU’s Faculty of Science and Knowledge Media Institute, Microsoft Research (Cambridge) and OOKL software.

The research is funded with £185,000 from the EPSRC-led Digital Economies programme. www.open.ac.uk/otih

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Giving children the power to be scientists Children who are taught how to think and act like scientists develop a clearer understanding of the subject.

A collaborative research project by the OU and The University of Nottingham has shown that school children who took the lead in investigating science topics of interest to them gained an understanding of good scientific practice.

The study showed that this method of ‘personal inquiry’ could be used to help children develop the skills needed to weigh up misinformation in the media, understand the impact of science and technology on everyday life and make better personal decisions on issues including diet, health and their own effect on the environment.

The three-year ‘Personal Inquiry’ project involved providing pupils aged 11 to 14 at a school in Nottingham and another in Milton Keynes with a new computer toolkit named nQuire. Running on both desktop PCs and handheld notebook-style devices, the software

is a high-tech twist on the traditional lesson plan – guiding the pupils through devising and planning scientific experiments, collecting and analysing data and discussing the results.

The flexible nature of the toolkit meant that children could become ‘science investigators’, starting an enquiry in the classroom, collecting data in the playground, a local nature reserve or even at home, and then sharing and analysing their findings back in class.

The project has been supported by ScienceScope and funded with £1.2 million from the ESRC and the EPSRC Technology Enhanced Learning Research Programme. The nQuire software is now available to teachers and schools as an Open Source application, available for free download at www.nquire.org.uk. www.pi-project.ac.uk

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EDUCATION

Open evidence for open learning Free and open is appealing – but where is the evidence that we can all learn by sharing?

Education is changing, but how and why? With $3 million funding from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, OLnet researches the impact and evidence, plus the use and value, of Open Educational Resources worldwide.

OLnet is looking across the globe and addressing the challenges from drop-out in the US to a lack of teachers in Africa.

OLnet has three main strands: • Research looking at how people learn, how teachers can design for openness,

and the way different contexts can all work with open solutions • Fellowships bringing in fresh expertise from across the globe, so that researchers develop appreciation of new solutions • Building new infrastructure that supports ‘collective intelligence’ to help researchers reason with evidence in a way that lets everyone join in.

OLnet is led by Patrick McAndrew of the OU’s Institute of Educational Technology, in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University and other universities worldwide. http://olnet.org

Networking for teachers and learners ‘Cloudworks’ is a place to share, find and discuss learning and teaching ideas and experiences.

Cloudworks has been developed by Prof Gráinne Conole and colleagues in the Institute of Educational Technology.

It is being used as part of a £400,000 JISC-funded project with Brunel, Cambridge, London South Bank and Reading universities.

The site’s use centres around conferences and workshops, virtual reading circles, virtual desk research, teaching and learning resources, open expert elicitations and learning design.

Cloudworks is helping teachers to change their practices and adopt more innovative approaches that make effective use of new technologies. http://cloudworks.ac.uk

Engaging students, inspiring schools EnquiryBlogger will inspire young learners who want their education to be more relevant to their lives and interests.

Research by Rebecca Ferguson and Simon Buckingham Shum of the OU’s Knowledge Media Institute is focusing on how improving enquiry skills can engage and challenge children at school.

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EnquiryBlogger supports children to work, collaborate and reflect on enquirybased studies that help them to harness their own interests and enthusiasm

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in order to develop their skills and knowledge. A nine-step approach provides a clear way of moving a personal enthusiasm into a detailed and valid enquiry that can be assessed by teachers and applied by pupils.

The project is funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s Learning Futures programme – a national initiative to foster, evaluate and share secondary school innovation. www.open.ac.uk/enquiry-blogger

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iSpot helps people learn about nature Learn what you’ve spotted in the park with iSpot’s community of friendly experts and learners.

to contribute to real science, and in 2010 won the New Media category in the Panda Awards – the wildlife and environment equivalent of the Oscars.

iSpot is a website open to anyone interested in wildlife and the environment. Users can upload pictures and share observations from their local areas, join discussion groups and forums, and learn from others willing to impart their expertise and knowledge on the site.

Headed by Prof Jonathan Silvertown (Faculty of Science), iSpot consists of six related projects and feeds into the OU module Neighbourhood nature.

It was developed with £2 million funding from the Open Air Laboratories project, via the Big Lottery Fund, and has recently attracted £100,000 JISC funding.

iSpot has pulled together expertise in ‘citizen science’, getting the public

www.iSpot.org.uk

World’s largest resource for the history of reading in Britain With over 30,000 entries, the UK Reading Experience Database (RED) offers fascinating information about British readers.

Led by the OU’s Prof Bob Owens, UK RED gathers the recorded evidences of reading in Britain (including British subjects abroad and visitors to Britain) during the period 1450 to 1945.

RED provides an unparalleled wealth of information about readers through British history, and has recently been relaunched to include more countries.

It is open access and committed to the social construction of knowledge, with members of the public encouraged to contribute data to the project. www.open.ac.uk/red

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EDUCATION

Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) Research directly addresses Millennium Development Goal 2, to provide every child with good quality basic schooling by 2015.

Sub-Saharan Africa is in urgent need of new and better-qualified teachers.

The TESSA International Consortium is developing new forms of teacher education to support systemic improvements in the quality of classroom interactions in 12 African countries.

TESSA brings together a range of African and international partners to investigate how, and in what form, resources and structures can be put in place to provide high quality

professional development opportunities for teachers on a large scale.

This research and development project is investigating a number of questions around teacher learning, including exploring how Open Educational Resources can best support improved professional learning in a range of forms and locations.

The project is led by Freda Wolfenden of the OU’s Faculty of Education and Language Studies. Since TESSA’s launch in 2005 it has attracted £3.9 million in funding, and in 2009 was awarded a Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education. www.tessafrica.net

Assisting chronically ill children’s education Technology that’s helping sick children with their science lessons.

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Denise Whitelock of the OU’s Institute of Educational Technology and Prof Roser Pinto of the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona are helping chronically ill children, through the use of new technology, to keep up with their science curriculum when they are in hospital or at home and cannot attend school.

The teaching helps them to understand their illness and to follow their treatment and dietary recommendations.

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The project ‘Technology Enhanced Activities for Learning Science for Children in Hospital’ (TeaCH) has built a software tool, Nefreduca, which is used with Spanish children hospitalised with chronic kidney problems.

The next phase of the research is to build a roadmap for technology use in teaching science to children with chronic illnesses, as agreed by experts in medicine, education and technology. http://crecim.uab.cat/projectes/ roadmapTEACH

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Unique focus on young lives Childhood poverty, learning and life transitions.

Since 2005, Martin Woodhead, Professor of Childhood Studies at the OU, has been a member of the senior research team of the international programme ‘Young Lives’, with responsibilities for child-focused and educational research components.

Young Lives is following the changing lives of 12,000 children in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam over 15 years.

Two cohorts of children are being followed up in each country with three major survey rounds already completed and a further two planned.

The study monitors ‘changing childhoods’ in the early 21st century and involves strong engagement with policy makers and planners concerned with children’s rights, education and child protection, both in the study countries and internationally.

It is a collaborative research project based at the University of Oxford with multiple international research partners, and £16 million funding from the UK Department for International Development. www.younglives.org.uk

Are children’s specific difficulties really specific?

Many children are diagnosed with specific language impairment (SLI), but their difficulties may be more general than previously thought.

Professor of Education David Messer (Faculty of Education and Language Studies) is working with colleagues from London South Bank University on a £280,000 ESRC-funded project looking at executive functioning in children with SLI. For a long time it has been thought that children with SLI only have difficulties with language, while their other abilities

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are as expected for their age, in the same way that children with dyslexia have a specific difficulty with reading.

These children with SLI make up around 5 to 10% of the school population and are at risk of low achievement and psycho-social problems in adolescence.

The research indicates that the difficulties of children with SLI extend to other areas of higher level thinking, with implications for diagnosis and theory. It also highlights a significant range of activities that are affected, with important implications for intervention. www.open.ac.uk/efesrc

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ENVIRONMENT Solutions to today’s complex environmental issues require new, integrated approaches that take into account social and economic factors. OU researchers inform and influence the attitudes and behaviours of the general public, industry and policy makers, as well as drawing on scientific disciplines.

What to do with our unsorted waste?

OU research assesses the performance and environmental impact of mechanical and biological treatment of household waste.

As a means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the UK is required by the EU to reduce landfilling of biodegradable waste. To date, the UK has focused on encouraging households to sort waste for recycling or composting, leaving any unsorted household or commercial waste to be landfilled untreated.

However, recycling and biological treatment of the unsorted waste can now be carried out in new Mechanical and Biological Treatment (MBT) plants.

MBT plants are new to the UK, and their performance needs to be assessed under UK regulatory and operating conditions. OU research led by Jim Frederickson (Faculty of Mathematics, Computing and Technology) will assess the performance and environmental impacts of one of the largest and most advanced MBT plants. The work is in collaboration with AmeyCespa, which runs the plant and is providing ÂŁ400,000 in research funding. The OU previously assisted the Environment Agency to develop its testing and monitoring requirements for MBT plants.

Findings suggest that this type of MBT plant is capable of automatically separating components of unsorted household wastes, such as metals, glass and plastics, as well as biodegradable material, for biological treatment. Biodegradable material can be effectively composted under controlled conditions, significantly reducing the methane generated when it is landfilled. This composting should also enhance the properties of the treated waste, making it suitable for a range of alternative applications such as restoring land and generating electricity.

Understanding more about adding value to the treated outputs is a key aspect of the research.

The research findings will assist the waste management industry and branches of Government to understand more about the operation of MBT plants, and how to optimise their performance and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

This will assist Government policy and investment decisions. www.ameycespa.com

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Low carbon living Understanding how electric vehicles can work in people’s lives and overcoming scepticism.

The need for substantial improvement in the environmental performance of all transport systems remains, and with energy security and costs being added to climate change concerns, action is needed sooner rather than later.

Considerable attention has been paid to the technical issues associated with the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) and low carbon domestic technologies, but there is a growing realisation that addressing issues of perception, meaning and identity, as well as institutional and financial barriers, are just as important for successful uptake.

OU research, led by Prof Stephen Potter, is contributing to the ÂŁ5 million EV project in the Milton Keynes (MK) Low Carbon Living programme. Researchers in the Faculty of Mathematics, Computing and Technology and the OU Business School are working with MK Economy and Learning Partnership, MK Council, Homes and Communities Agency and other institutions to provide a research basis for informing the public

engagement and social marketing strategies. Expertise in innovation diffusion processes, sustainability transition models and social marketing means that user understandings, hopes, concerns and barriers for EV adoption are being identified.

Activities include running public and business-focused user workshops, supporting the development of the EV Experience Centre and assisting in the development of an interactive website to improve public understanding of how an EV can fit in with the user’s lifestyle.

This research will help MK deliver an early uptake of low carbon electric vehicles and marks the start of a long-term partnership to support the 20 year+ ambition of the Low Carbon Living programme to make MK an exemplary low carbon community that other parts of the UK can follow.

The University is in this for the long haul to low carbon living. www.milton-keynes.gov.uk/ mklowcarbonliving

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ENVIRONMENT

Food or fuel: what’s the solution for society?

A new project led by the OU brings together seven European institutes to tackle big challenges of global sustainability.

Is it better to grow biofuels or food? To grow food where it’s needed or where it grows quickest? These are really hard questions that demand a new level of integrated analysis. Neil Edwards of the Faculty of Science is leading the multi-million pound project ‘Enhancing Robustness and Model Integration for the Assessment of Global Environmental Change’ (ERMITAGE), which is addressing these questions.

Climate change will have huge impacts on the environment and the economy, but the computer models used to assess the future of the economy and the

environment are complex and can’t talk to each other. ERMITAGE aims to solve this problem by achieving a new level of integration of disparate computer models.

Related research has already shown the radical difference in land area required if food is grown as locally as possible or as efficiently as possible.

A huge amount of knowledge in this area is trapped inside specialised domains, in the computer models, publications and minds of various experts. ERMITAGE aims to put this information into a common language so that the people who need to use it (policy makers and strategists in affected industries, for example) can make informed decisions for society and the planet. www.open.ac.uk/ermitage

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The second most important greenhouse gas MethaneNet brings together worldleading scientists to generate ideas and solutions.

Much controversy surrounds the explanation for changes over the last decade in the concentration of atmospheric methane. Evidence implicates methane in past dramatic changes in climate. Understanding the future threat requires scientists from many disciplines (e.g. microbiologists, geologists, atmospheric chemists, ecologists, computer modellers, biogeochemists, marine scientists and meteorologists), and other stakeholders, to collaborate effectively.

MethaneNet is also providing the infrastructure for fruitful collaboration via new media. The interactive website MethaneNet.org actively solicits contributions (via blogs, videos, comments and discussion groups) and the popular @MethaneNet twitter feed allows rapid communication of all methane-related matters. www.MethaneNet.org www.Twitter.com/MethaneNet

The MethaneNet project is led by Vincent Gauci (Faculty of Science) and is funded

by NERC. It offers unique opportunities for communication between disciplines united by the urgent need to understand the threat methane could pose to climate stability.

A series of meetings and workshops will bring together specialists who may not ordinarily collaborate, providing opportunities to discuss ideas, identify knowledge gaps and establish priorities.

MethaneNet will provide research funding bodies (e.g. NERC) with better information on which to base funding decisions. While policy makers, responsible for making difficult decisions about mitigating greenhouse gas emissions (e.g. policies for agriculture, waste management and energy industries), will be better informed.

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ENVIRONMENT

Acoustical greening of cities Exploiting transport corridors, building surfaces, street furniture, open areas and parks to reduce noise in urban areas.

Noise pollution is a major environmental problem within the EU, and the associated health impacts are well documented. The goal of the €3.9 million EC-funded project, Hosanna (Holistic and Sustainable Abatement of Noise by Optimised Combinations of Natural and Artificial Means), is to contribute knowledge and know-how for obtaining large-scale and cost-effective noise abatement in urban and rural areas in a sustainable manner.

Sustainable cities need sustainable methods of noise control. The ‘Ground treatments’ strand of Hosanna is led by the OU’s Prof Keith Attenborough, and investigates methods based on deploying trees, shrubs, roof gardens, vegetated facades, low barriers using stones, rough or cultivated ground and crops instead of purpose-built noise fences and road surfaces.

This research will lead to simplified methodologies so that the planning,

consulting and engineering communities can choose and incorporate these innovative solutions. In addition, new methods for assessing perceived noise environment and noise annoyance will be developed. The results will inform city planners and engineers, and models for noise-mapping software will help them define the most appropriate ‘action plans’ as required by the EU Directive on Noise.

Noise reduction via natural means has a positive correlation with air pollution, biodiversity, microclimate, water handling, energy efficiency and climate change. The costs of having green areas and surfaces in urban and rural environments are well established and accepted. Optimising the noise abatement potential of green areas and surfaces will therefore reduce the harmful effects of noise and provide highly cost-effective solutions for sustainable urban development.

Participating businesses, such as Müller-BBM and Canevaflor, are poised to exploit particular outputs commercially. www.greener-cities.eu

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Boosting world food production Using sound to test soil fertility.

Scientists have recognised that the growth of wheat is hampered during water shortages because of an increase in soil strength, and millions of pounds a year can be lost through decreased yields. In addition, wheat productivity will need to increase to meet a predicted 50% rise in food demand by 2030.

To ensure global food security and reliable production, new methods of soil strength testing are required, since the existing penetrometer method is invasive and laborious. OU Prof Keith Attenborough is leading a ÂŁ680,000 ESPRC-funded project to develop a new way to measure soil strength. The project is investigating a non-invasive acoustic-seismic method through laboratory and field measurements.

Sound at several frequencies is played near the ground surface and measurements are made of the sound pressure near the ground using microphones, and of soil particle movements using a laser doppler velocimeter (LDV).

The reflection of sound at the soil surface is influenced by air permeability, and soil particle velocity is influenced by sound speeds and near-surface soil layering. The sound speeds in soils are influenced by the forces between particles which in turn depend on water content and soil structure. Near-surface layering may be caused by cultivation or by changes in moisture. Hence, the interaction of sound with soils provides information relevant to root growth.

The proposed technique will provide the basis for the development of automated data acquisition and processing in the field. This is likely to require a cheaper and more robust version of the LDV. The potential for wider exploitation of this application along with others such as buried object detection should ensure future commercial adoption. Project collaborators include Rothamsted Research, Syngenta Sensors Centre and Delta-T Devices. http://acoustics.open.ac.uk

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ENVIRONMENT

Struggles over water in the Andes The growing mining industry in the Andes, and subsequent increasing demand for water, is transforming indigenous people’s lives, livelihoods and landscapes.

Governments in the Andes are promoting mining due to the revenue it generates. A ÂŁ228,000 ESRC-funded research project, led by Jessica Budds (Faculty of Social Sciences), investigates the implications of the growing demand for water resources by the mining industry in Andean countries.

The aim is to understand how the changing distribution and governance of water influences lives, livelihoods and the region’s traditional landscapes.

It will inform debates around the extent to which extractive industries contribute to poverty alleviation; the tension between the preservation of indigenous groups and the use of their land and resources; the extraction of resources for economic development; and the sustainable management of natural resources in low- and middle-income countries. www.open.ac.uk/andean-water

As well as examining the impacts of mining on the quality and quantity of water, the research also focuses on the ways in which access to, and use of, water is organised. Hence the research is also concerned with the strategies that mining companies use to acquire water, such as buying land, building hydraulic infrastructure and lobbying decision makers, as well as how local people defend their water rights.

The research points to the changes that indigenous people are attributing to the mines, such as shrinking wetlands that provide fodder for their livestock, reduced water flows to their irrigation canals, pressure to sell their land and contamination from mining processes.

The research will provide a fuller understanding of the dynamics and implications of water use for mining, and is aimed at policy makers, civil society organisations and academics, as well as the communities affected by mining.

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Inhuman nature Rethinking the social life of humans in the context of earth processes.

Powerful events in recent years, such as the Indian Ocean tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and outbreaks of wildfire and floods, remind us just how volatile our earth can be.

Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet, is a new publication

by Nigel Clark of the OU’s OpenSpace Research Centre. The book began as a plea for the social sciences to take environmental issues to heart. Gradually it became a call for social thought to engage more deeply with the dynamics of the earth itself – an appeal not to allow the problem of our own impact on nature to overshadow the question of what nature can do of its own accord.

While attentive to the current environmental predicament, Inhuman Nature locates the issue of humaninduced change in the broader context of dwelling on a planet which is more turbulent and unpredictable than most of us had previously imagined.

Recognising that human lives are inherently vulnerable, the book suggests there is a vast reservoir of experience – inscribed in communities, bodies, landscapes, stories and objects – to do with making it through the variability of earth processes. As well as conversing with the earth and life sciences, the book taps into recent themes in social theory and philosophy about the agency of more-than-human things, and about care, responsiveness and hospitality. http://books.google.co.uk

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HEALTH The OU aims to transform lives through excellent biomedical, health and social care research. The medical aspects of health and wellbeing are often inseparable from the type of support provided to individuals and their own views and experiences. A multidisciplinary approach coupled with public outreach ensures holistic solutions.

Developing early warning of epidemics Despite the advances of modern medicine, populations are still at risk from epidemic diseases – as recent outbreaks of swine flu and SARS have shown.

Concern about mass infections has been heightened in the wake of 9/11 by fears of germ-warfare-style ‘bioterrorism’ attacks.

Key to saving lives is to detect rises in infectious diseases as early as possible, so that measures can be put in place to contain their spread. A team in the OU’s Faculty of Mathematics, Computing and Technology is developing an enhanced automated outbreak detection system that will be faster and more comprehensive than current methods.

As a result of the proliferation of computerised databases, the amount of data available is too great to be processed effectively by hand. The outbreak detection systems currently in use in the UK, and in several other European countries, were developed in the 1990s. They need to be evaluated and updated in the light of the new data.

pose a threat. It will work well across a very wide range of infection types with different trends and seasonal patterns, and will be able to cope with ‘noisy’ data.

Researchers plan to have some of these enhancements in place for the 2012 London Olympics and the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games.

The research team is led by OU Prof Paddy Farrington, in collaboration with the Health Protection Agency and Strathclyde University. It is supported by £621,000 of funding from the Medical Research Council. www.open.ac.uk/medical-stats

The new automated system is based on statistical methods and will enable all the available information to be evaluated in near real time. The system will be capable of surveying thousands of different infections which potentially

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Modelling and overcoming the biological interfaces that prevent nerve regeneration Spinal cord injuries directly affect around two million people worldwide.

They are severely debilitating, sometimes resulting in permanent paralysis.

A high proportion of spinal injuries occur in young people and may lead to many years of dependency, meaning that their economic impact is also considerable.

Researchers from the University’s Faculty of Science have developed a new way to study the damage caused to the nervous system by spinal injuries, and to test potential therapies. They are using 3D laboratory cultures of central nervous system cells, which provide a more life-like model of how cells behave than conventional 2D cell cultures.

The team, led by James Phillips, is using the 3D culture system to grow astrocytes, the predominant cells involved in blocking repair after spinal cord damage. They are examining the response of astrocytes to damage and repair, and screening potential stem cell therapies that are being developed to treat spinal cord injury.

They are also working on a more advanced 3D-interface model, and are

developing tissue-engineered grafts for implantation into sites of spinal cord injury to promote nerve regeneration.

As well as offering a more realistic model of what happens in the body, the 3D cell culture technique may provide an alternative to the use of animals in some experiments. The team is now working with an industrial partner to develop viable production technology for an advanced central nervous system cell culture system suitable for widespread use in research and development.

The research has been supported with ÂŁ200,000 of funding from The Wellcome Trust. It is being carried out in collaboration with Queen Mary University of London and University College London. www.open.ac.uk/tissue-eng

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HEALTH

Finding the balance between leadership and governance in health services The UK’s Health and Social Care Bill 2011 places clinical leadership at the heart of National Health Service (NHS) reforms. New research reveals how this can be brought about in practice.

As the NHS seeks to do more with less (it faces cost reductions of up to £20 billion in the next four to five years), leadership is required to drive service redesigns to deliver quality and productivity improvements, whilst also ensuring accountability and governance.

Research led by Prof John Storey (OU Business School) on ‘Comparative governance arrangements and comparative performance’, is now being followed (in collaboration with Richard Holti) with a new project entitled ‘Possibilities and pitfalls for clinical leadership in improving service quality, innovation and productivity’.

The two research strands, funded by the National Institute for Health Research for £349,000 and £150,000, respectively, are central

to current NHS reforms and debates about these reforms.

Research includes: • Interviews with senior NHS officials at national, regional and local levels • A national postal survey of all trust board directors throughout England • Two specific service areas, sexual health and dementia services, selected jointly with the NHS to represent services where potential exists for radical improvements if leadership can be applied across primary and secondary sector boundaries.

The idea of clinical leadership is a key component of the coalition government’s proposed redesign of the NHS. GPs, for example, are to lead on the commissioning of virtually all health services. Likewise, service redesign through clinical leadership with an emphasis on the Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention programme is the central narrative of the Department of Health. www.open.ac.uk/nhs-governance

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‘Invented here’ versus ‘not invented here’ Does being developed by NHS staff, in an NHS context, make it more or less likely that a healthcare technology will be adopted successfully?

Successful adoption of technology is very important to the UK’s NHS. Clive Savory and Prof Joyce Fortune of the University’s Faculty of Mathematics, Computing and Technology are conducting research asking whether a technology developed by NHS staff, in an NHS context, is more or less likely to be adopted successfully than one developed commercially. The research is funded by £237,000 from the National Institute for Health Research: Service Delivery and Organisation Programme.

For the NHS, this research will provide insights into the enablers of and barriers to successful adoption of technologies, and a clearer understanding of the relative adoption performance between NHS-developed and commercially developed technologies. It will also inform the design of technologies. http://nant.open.ac.uk

Close to 40 NHS-developed technologies have been investigated, and interviews have been conducted with developers, adopters and, where relevant, the industrial partners who manufacture and/or market the technologies. This has allowed the research team to group them into archetypes such as ‘import and modify’ and ‘crisis response’.

Helping the NHS keep cool As the climate warms up, OU research looks at how to make buildings resilient to heat waves.

Claudia Eckert, of the OU’s Department of Design, Development, Environment and Materials, is working with colleagues from Cambridge, Leeds and Loughborough universities on a £900,000 EPSRC-funded research project looking at how to make NHS buildings more resilient to heat waves.

Predictions are for a warmer and hotter climate over the next few decades.

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Many people are hospitalised during heat waves – and hospitals need to provide safe havens for these people to recover in. Air conditioning is not the answer, because it takes four times as much energy as heating and the NHS needs to cut its emissions drastically rather than increase them.

Starting from an assessment of current actual temperatures, the team is assessing the possibilities and implications of different types of buildings. www.robusthospitals.org.uk

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HEALTH

At the heart of the home: transitions in kitchen living How well does kitchen design serve our needs as we grow older?

The kitchen is a centre for all kinds of activities – such as domestic chores, social gatherings, creative cooking, recycling waste and feeding pets.

The Transitions in Kitchen Living project is building up a picture of the experiences of older kitchen users, which will be used to improve guidance on kitchen design.

The study is led by Prof Sheila Peace of the OU’s Faculty of Health and Social Care, in collaboration with researchers at Loughborough University. The project is supported by a £300,000 ESRC grant. www.open.ac.uk/ageing

OU researchers have been talking to women and men between the ages of 61 and 91 years, living in ‘ordinary’ and ‘supportive’ housing, about kitchens they have known, and the good and bad points about their current kitchen.

The project team will use the information to develop a guide that considers how kitchens can meet users’ needs throughout their lifetimes. It will be aimed at older people, occupational therapists, kitchen designers, architects, builders and policy makers.

How do young people make sense of death?

Childhood and death are topics that are rarely brought together, yet mortality and bereavement are common in young lives.

OU research seeks to open up this often overlooked issue, and provide a strong voice for children’s views.

Building on her work from the ‘Impact of Bereavement and Loss on Young People’ project, Jane Ribbens McCarthy from the Faculty of Social Sciences is planning to commence work on a related project called ‘Death and Young People’.

Recent research activities question how we can understand the contested terrain between ‘normal’ family troubles and troubled and troubling families. So far ‘Family Troubles? Exploring Changes and Challenges in the Family Lives of Children and Young People’ has resulted in a two-day conference with a host of key speakers from universities around the world. www.open.ac.uk/transitions

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Fertility, birth and work Becoming a mother brings sudden and profound changes to many areas of women’s lives.

The Dynamics of Motherhood study followed women from late pregnancy until two years after the birth of their child, to explore how becoming a mother changed their identities and how the arrival of a new generation changed family dynamics.

The study identified a ‘motherhood shock’ experience, with women unprepared for many of the issues they encountered. It has produced a number

of concrete policy recommendations to improve women’s experiences of motherhood. These include: improved information on the rights of pregnant workers and maternity rights; more workplace-based childcare; spaces for new mothers to mix and meet; consistency of midwife care; and support or specialist antenatal and education services for young mothers.

The study is led by Prof Rachel Thomson and Mary Jane Kehily of the OU’s Faculty of Health and Social Care, and funded by a £208,000 ESRC grant. www.open.ac.uk/motherhood

Link between autism and IT-rich regions Research has for the first time shown that autism diagnoses are more common in an IT-rich region.

support the suggestion that people who work in hi-tech engineering and computing industries may be more likely to have a child with autism.

Differences in the prevalence of autism were recorded for school-aged children in three regions in the Netherlands. The region with the highest school-reported prevalence, Eindhoven, is rich in IT, with 30% of jobs in technology or ICT. The other two regions are of similar size and socio-economic class, but have fewer jobs in IT and technology, and seem to have lower rates of autism. The results

Rosa Hoekstra (Faculty of Science) and colleagues at the University of Cambridge are conducting this research, which is funded by the Medical Research Council. The researchers hope to follow up their initial findings with an extensive screening study. www.open.ac.uk/autism

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SCIENCE The OU is a leading international centre of academic excellence in science and technology. Research is both ‘blue-sky’ and applied, finding solutions to specific scientific and technological problems. The OU is known for transferring technological expertise in one area to provide solutions in other areas.

Unravelling the origins of life New insights into our solar system, the possible origins of life on Earth and whether life may exist on planets around other stars.

The Europlanet network is Europe’s largest integration project for the planetary science community. It is using the mass of data collected by past and present space missions – it combines space exploration, ground-based observations, laboratory experiments and numerical modelling and provides access to laboratory and field facilities, advanced modelling, simulation and data analysis resources, as well as data produced by space missions and ground-based telescopes.

It was set up with €6 million funding from the EU Framework VII Programme. The OU is one of the major coordinators, responsible for all research facility access.

Experiments are currently taking place at the OU to mimic the atmosphere on Saturn’s moon Titan, measured for the first time by the Cassini-Huygens mission. These experiments may provide clues to the early atmosphere of Earth, which gave birth to life. www.europlanet-eu.org

Chemical reactions in space that could be the precursors of life.

Space appears to be a lifeless void, but new research is revealing that even in this cold and empty environment, chemical reactions can occur which could be the precursors of life.

Laboratory experiments by the LASSIE (Laboratory Astrochemical Surface Science in Europe) Initial Training Network have shown it is possible to synthesise complex molecules by the interaction between cosmic radiation and interstellar dust. As this process is part of star and planet formation,

it means the chemical ingredients necessary for the development of life are common across the universe.

LASSIE brings together Europe’s 13 leading surface and solid state astrochemistry research groups, supported by a partnership of six high technology partners. The OU project team is led by Prof Nigel Mason of the Department of Physical Sciences. www.u-cergy.fr/LERMA-LAMAP/ LASSIE

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Studying comets to find out more about Earth’s origins Ptolemy: miniaturised instrumentation for Rosetta.

Our Earth was formed from the build-up of smaller chunks of material billions of years ago. Comets are pieces of debris left over from that era, and studying them reveals more about Earth’s origins.

ESA’s Rosetta space mission was launched in 2004, headed for a comet called 67 P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Onboard is Ptolemy, an instrument built by the OU’s Department of Physical Sciences (DPS).

Ptolemy will study the volatile components of the body of the comet.

It was originally developed for laboratory use and, as size and weight limits are crucial on space missions, DPS shrank the instrument down from the size of a car to the size of a shoe-box.

The project is led by Prof Ian Wright of DPS, in collaboration with the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. www.open.ac.uk/rosetta

New insights into the death of a planet OU research has for the first time identified a star swallowing a planet.

Astronomers had known this was a theoretical possibility when a planet and a star get too close, but it had never been seen before.

The doomed planet, WASP-12b, was discovered in 2008 by the UK SuperWASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets) consortium. The OU is one of seven main institutions that make up SuperWASP, a world-leading consortium for detecting planets which lie outside our own solar system.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, a team led by Carole Haswell (DPS) studied WASP-12b, which has the highest known surface temperature of any planet in our entire galaxy. They discovered that huge clouds of the planet’s material are being captured by its parent star, which they believe could destroy the planet entirely within ten million years. www.superwasp.org/news.htm

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SCIENCE

Searching for life on Mars The OU has a leading role in the UK’s involvement in the next mission to Mars.

ExoMars is a series of missions to Mars scheduled for launch in 2016 and 2018.

Its principle objectives are to search for signs of past or present life on Mars and to investigate trace gases such as methane in the atmosphere, to better understand the evolution and habitability of Mars. The Department of Physical Sciences has a major involvement in four areas: • The UVIS spectrometer, led by Manish Patel, will be part of the NOMAD instrument on the 2016 ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, which will look for gases related to life in the atmosphere of Mars. UVIS will use sunlight to look for traces of ozone in the Martian atmosphere and to study Martian dust and clouds. Ozone is important as it blocks ultraviolet radiation harmful to life.

• The 2016 Orbiter will also land a small base station on the surface of Mars, which will conduct short-term observations of the Martian surface environment. Manish Patel will be involved in interpreting observations of sunlight and dust suspended in the atmosphere.

• The Entry and Descent Landing System will ensure the safety of the base station during entry and descent as well as providing an opportunity to investigate the Martian atmosphere.

Stephen Lewis is jointly leading this element with a group from Italy.

• Stephen Lewis is also involved in developing the ExoMars Climate Sounder, an infrared radiometer that will provide daily global measurements of temperature, pressure, dust, water vapour and ices. www.open.ac.uk/exomars

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A virtual microscope for extra-terrestrial rocks ‘Space Eyeful’ engages the public with planetary science.

Space Eyeful provides a website where the general public can study space rock samples which hold the key to the origin of our Solar System.

and Peter Whalley (Knowledge Media Institute). The natural history museums in London and Vienna are also collaborating. Space Eyeful is funded by a €10,000 grant from Europlanet. www.open.ac.uk/microscope

The project team is creating a simple online database of interactive high-resolution microscope images from a variety of extra-terrestrial rocks (including rocks from the Moon and Mars), accompanied by a short descriptive text.

While the key target audience is 11 to 18 year-olds and their parents and teachers, Space Eyeful is open to all, and provides access to rare museum specimens formerly only accessible to researchers.

The OU project team is led by Mahesh Anand and Victoria Pearson with Andrew Tindle, all from the Faculty of Science,

Image source: NASA

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SCIENCE

Protecting our nuclear submariners Expertise honed in exploring outer space is being turned to protecting the health and safety of crews on board nuclear submarines, a vital part of our national defences.

A team from the University’s Department of Physical Sciences (DPS) is developing a prototype air-monitoring system, for evaluation by BAE Systems as a potential alternative to the existing technology. The Distributed Atmospheric Monitoring System is intended to continuously monitor submariners’ atmospheric environment and alert them to any anomalies in the gases present.

The team is building on its experience of developing small, robust instruments for analysing gases in space, which have been carried on board missions including the Beagle 2 mission to Mars and the Rosetta space mission which will land on a comet in 2014.

In many ways a journey into the depths is more challenging. Nuclear submarines are the most complex vehicles ever devised, patrolling the most hostile environment on earth 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and operating in some of the remotest places known.

The team is led by Geraint Morgan, and funded by BAE Systems, with original funding from the MoD’s Technology Development Programme.

The project is an example of DPS’s work in the field of technology transfer from space missions, which capitalises upon its unique portfolio of expertise.

DPS currently has over 50 agreements with government departments and agencies, academic institutions, not-for-profit organisations and commercial companies. www.open.ac.uk/dps-enterprise

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Imaging the Earth from space A space camera developed at the OU’s e2v Centre for Electronic Imaging (CEI), will be aboard the first of a new generation of micro-satellites.

The CEI is a collaboration between the OU and UK industry, to conduct worldleading research and development into detector technology for space science.

The OU’s partner in this venture is e2v, a leading developer and manufacturer of specialised components and sub-systems for the medical, aerospace and defence industries. It is a world leader in the design and supply of image sensors to organisations such as NASA (e.g. for upgrading the Hubble Space Telescope).

The C3D instrument was largely developed at the OU, by e2v-sponsored PhD students, in line with CEI’s mission to provide research training at postgraduate and post-doctoral levels.

CEI is led by Prof Andrew Holland from the OU’s Faculty of Science. It was launched with around £1 million of funding from e2v, and receives funding from other sources including the Science and Technologies Facilities Council, ESA, the UK Space Agency and industry. www.open.ac.uk/cei

The main focus of the CEI’s work is the development of imaging sensors for space applications, and it has particular expertise in X-ray spectroscopy and the study of the effects of radiation damage.

Its other key activities are to train new PhD researchers and to promote knowledge exchange with industry.

Its Compact CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) Camera Demonstrator (C3D), a compact Earthimaging camera, will form part of the payload of the UKube-1 satellite, due to launch in early 2012. Ukube-1 is the first UK CubeSat, a new generation of satellites. The Image Demonstrator is designed to perform a variety of imaging tasks using CMOS technology to capture light and convert it into digital signals. As well as taking images of the Earth, it will test the effect of space radiation on such instruments.

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SCIENCE

Beneath the surface of Iceland’s volcanoes Gravity measurements of magma indicate possible precursors to a new eruption in Iceland.

caldera, and instead reveals deflation.

This is probably because magma is draining away – the question is where is it going?

The hazards of volcanic activity in Iceland range from lava flows to ash explosions, with after-effects ranging from local devastation to international economic chaos and health impacts.

Ash and acidic haze can have far-reaching negative consequences – as was the case with recent air travel disruption resulting from a relatively small eruption at Eyjafjallajökull.

While Askja has been sinking, two regions to the north and south, also in the proximity of active volcanoes, have been rising. These big ‘central’ volcanoes all have north–south trending fissure swarms associated with them, and it is possible that magma is travelling underground along these fissures between the volcanoes. Deep earthquakes in a region to the north of Askja also indicate magma moving north from Askja towards Krafla volcano.

In addition to the need for improved modelling systems to predict the path of erupted ash, it is clear that a detailed understanding of the shallow crustal structure and processes is required to identify future eruption sites and the likely duration of activity.

The centre of the largest caldera at Askja volcano in central Iceland has been sinking over the last 40 years.

Prof Hazel Rymer, the University’s Dean of Science, is using micro-gravity techniques to measure ground deformation to provide clues as to what is happening below the surface.

The research shows no evidence for deep magma accumulation beneath the

Monitoring micro-gravity changes will quantify any mass changes beneath the surface, and continuous gravity measurements at a few key locations will give the rate of magma movement.

These methods will reveal how much magma is moving, where to and at what rate – and show whether magma leaving the Askja system is accumulating beneath Krafla. If this is the case, it will provide valuable insights about where and when a future eruption at Krafla may occur – information essential for hazard warning and mitigation. www.open.ac.uk/askja

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Research for safety-critical applications Aerospace and nuclear power are industries where the structural integrity of materials and components is of prime importance.

Professors Mike Fitzpatrick and John Bouchard of the OU’s Materials Engineering Group are leading research into the structural integrity of safetycritical applications in the aerospace and nuclear industries. Work on the characterisation of material properties and internal stresses helps to ensure safety of the designs.

Working with the nuclear industry, their research assesses the residual stresses and integrity of welded joints, in order to improve the performance of metallic materials in nuclear power applications.

Initial work on residual stresses in welded structures led to collaborative work with Airbus looking at integral structures for aerospace through a programme assessing novel bonded crack retarders. This was in order to improve damage tolerance and hence increase the life span of such structural assemblies. This concept is currently being taken through to the design stage.

The research has resulted in the development and application of advanced experimental techniques – such as neutron diffraction for residual stress measurement, and the new worldleading contour method for residual stress analysis (with research funded by Rolls-Royce and EMDA). Novel software packages for experimental design and simulation, which are licensed at leading experimental facilities around the world, have also been developed. www.open.ac.uk/structural-integrity

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SOCIETY OU researchers work within an interdisciplinary framework to analyse cultural phenomena and their conceptual underpinnings, as well as their aesthetic and social value. A particular strength is the use of digital resources and methods for both research and public engagement in the arts and humanities.

After the financial crisis A European strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth.

The financial crisis has dramatically changed the economic environment, perceptions of it and the policy making priorities. While short-term objectives are crucial in stabilising the economy in this phase of turmoil, the Finance, Innovation and Growth (FINNOV) research collaboration focuses on the long-term consequences of different financing innovations for the distribution of income and employment generation.

A research partnership between seven leading European institutions, FINNOV is aimed at understanding the relationship between changing financial markets, innovation dynamics and economic performance. The project studies how these relationships influence economic growth as it is experienced by individuals, businesses and the wider economy. The project is coordinated by the OU and led by Prof Mariana Mazzucato in the Faculty of Social Sciences.

The long-term economic performance of Europe depends not only on its ability to generate new knowledge and inventions, but crucially on translating invention into innovation and innovation into economic growth. Business experimentation is central to these processes, and fostering this ability must be a central plank of industrial policy in an enlarged EU. The FINNOV team’s work has led to it contributing to a number of high-profile European Commission (EC) meetings and workshops, and the EC has cited FINNOV as one of the most important projects related to growth and jobs. The research findings will assist policy makers and European industry to understand the sources, implications and management of positive and negative changes in financial markets. The project is funded with a ₏1.49 million grant from the EC. www.finnov-fp7.eu

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Emotional about money Investigating how traders and investors can learn to manage their emotions and make better financial decisions.

The recent economic crisis has demonstrated the consequences of poor financial decision making among professional traders and private investors. Human decision making always involves emotion – brain studies show that without emotions we become incapable of making good decisions, yet emotions also underlie a great deal of poor decision making.

Research led by Prof Mark FentonO’Creevy of the OU Business School places management of emotion at the heart of learning to make sound financial decisions. The research project aims to help traders and investors work with their emotions more effectively by producing learning approaches that employ

physiological sensors and game-based technologies to analyse behavioural patterns and to support the learning process. Wearable sensor equipment helps build a picture of a person’s emotional state during both game-play and financial decision making, and automated event logging generates behavioural profile data.

The research is part of a multi-million pound project xDelia. The OU is collaborating with Bristol University and institutions in Spain, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and Denmark. www.xdelia.org

SME performance, problems and prospects Most businesses are small. They are a vital factor in economic, social and environmental terms, and tracking key trends is a continuing challenge.

Edited by the OU’s Richard Blundel and Emeritus Prof Colin Gray, with support from ACCA and Barclays Business, The Quarterly Survey of Small Business in Britain (QSSB) monitors the performance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Each report represents the views and experiences of more than 900 owners and managers, examining problems,

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prospects and emerging issues such as cloud computing, mobile communications and carbon audits.

During its 26-year lifespan, the QSSB’s findings have been used by government departments, corporations, academic researchers and practitioners, as well as stimulating follow-on research. www.open.ac.uk/quarterly-survey

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Linked data in practice Working with learners, researchers and practitioners at the OU, the JISC-funded LUCERO project (Linking University Content for Education and Research Online) uses linked data techniques to expose and connect previously separate educational and research outputs.

As part of the project, the team has worked with the University’s art historians to investigate researchers’ linked data requirements. The aim is to document the business process changes needed to achieve successful

approaches to exposing content as linked data, on an institutional scale.

JISC Programme Manager, David Flanders commented: “This new centralised data-watering pump is the first launched of its kind in UK universities and should be celebrated”.

The project is led by Mathieu d’Aquin of the Knowledge Media Institute in collaboration with the Faculty of Arts and Library Services. http://lucero-project.info

Opening up the ivory towers: digital humanities at the OU Innovative use of digital technologies offers the potential for everyone to enjoy arts research.

We are all well aware that digital technologies are changing the ways in which the majority of us, including researchers, work. The OU’s Faculty of Arts is keen to experiment with and question the role of digital technologies as a way of enhancing its research, and developing, delivering and disseminating it through innovative engagement such as e-knowledge tools.

Researchers in the faculty are collaborating with institutions such as the British Library, the Tate, King’s College London, the University of

Oxford, and University College London, to help identify the benefits and possible disadvantages of utilising digital means.

The benefits of digital arts content being widely and easily accessible to society are huge, and similar benefits, including efficient and effective working, are acknowledged for collaboration between academics and relevant institutions.

The faculty has run international conferences to explore key strategic issues in the practice of digital humanities, as well as workshops to help academics make the most of social media such as Twitter and Academia.edu (the ‘Facebook for academics’). www.open.ac.uk/digital-humanities

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The ancient world’s superhighway Enabling users to discover more about places of the ancient world and do fascinating things with what they find out.

The Google Ancient Places (GAP) project aims to make rare texts easily accessible and to experiment with ways of visualising geographical locations referenced in literature using Google Earth. The Pelagios project complements GAP by enabling users to bring together other kinds of information – not just texts, but also images, databases and other resources that reference ancient places – and provide a richer and deeper ‘user’ experience. By adding geospatial data to classical texts,

new insights are revealed, making data otherwise hidden in the texts explicit and real at a new level of understanding.

Elton Barker of the OU’s Faculty of Arts leads the research and is working with the OU’s Knowledge Media Institute, the universities of Southampton, Cologne, New York, Edinburgh and California, as well as Tufts University, King’s College London, and the Austrian Institute of Technology. The GAP project is funded with a Google Digital Humanities Award and Pelagios with a JISC grant.

Both projects have a dedicated blog (http://googleancientplaces. wordpress.com and http://pelagiosproject.blogspot.com).

Cross fertilisation between art curators and researchers The Open Arts Archive is a major collaborative website linking many art institutions.

This website and archive provides open access to a wealth of artistic, cultural and educational resources provided by the OU and currently 20 collaborating partners. It is managed and hosted by the OU’s Art History Department and chaired by Prof Gill Perry.

The archive is an example of the University’s use of web technology to

improve access to, and knowledge of, art, art practice, art history, exhibitions and outreach programmes across the country, benefiting a broad public audience as well as practitioners and students.

Multimedia resources include seminars, study days, artist interviews, curators’ talks, research and exhibition archives produced in collaboration with a network of museums and galleries. http://openartsarchive.org

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Future Internet The internet not only drives the economy, but underpins many areas in society. For example, the number of users of Facebook is greater than the population of every country on the planet, with the exception of India and China.

Prof John Domingue of the OU’s Knowledge Media Institute is on the Steering Committee for the Future Internet Initiative. This activity will define a new internet that meets the economic and societal needs of Europe. This is a €1 billion EU initiative, which sees collaboration between more than 150 EU projects. www.future-internet.eu

Including older people in the technology revolution Millions are being spent across the EU and in the UK on trying to get technologically excluded people online, and on devices to support independence in later life. Much of this is wasted because of non-use or a lack of interest by older people.

Research on ‘Older people and technological inclusion’, led by Caroline Holland of the Faculty of Health and Social Care, is looking at ways of understanding older people’s relationships with technologies to discover better methods of inclusion.

Over a series of four ESRC-funded seminars the researchers are taking a critical look at current evidence about older people’s alleged fear of technology or inability to ‘get it’, but also at claims about how technology can be expected to improve their quality of life.

The intention is to establish a network, bringing together people who are interested in moving this agenda on – older people, academics, practitioners, policy makers and commercial companies – to encourage better commercial applications from a deeper understanding of what older people want and value. www.open.ac.uk/tech-inclusion

Work with groups of older people shows that in the right circumstances they are just as likely as younger people to take an interest in more social and playful uses of technology, and enjoy them.

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What will watching TV be like in the future?

Prof John Domingue of the OU’s Knowledge Media Institute is working on an innovative project, NoTube, to demonstrate how semantic web technologies can be used as a tool to connect TV content and the web through Linked Open Data as part of the wider trend of TV and web convergence.

The ultimate goal of the NoTube project is to develop a flexible end-to-end technical architecture for the personalised creation, distribution

and consumption of TV content, reaching wider audiences and providing smarter, more appropriate and personalised content recommendations.

With NoTube, the digital entertainment is no longer a single-TV-viewer activity – it is a community-based experience.

The project is developing a set of technical web-based tools and services which will be made available for others to re-use and build upon. www.notube.tv

Engaging the socially disadvantaged with technology The digital revolution has provided many benefits and opportunities, but what is the impact on the disadvantaged minority who are at risk of social exclusion as an increasing number of government and public services migrate online?

EGOV4U will place relevant technology into the hands, homes and communities of the socially disadvantaged and deploy a European award-winning model developed by Milton Keynes Council that includes contributions by academics from the OU Business School and the Faculty of Mathematics, Computing and Technology.

EGOV4U, Inclusive eGovernment, is an EC-funded project with the core objective to develop and deploy a model of citizen-centric government and public services that is capable of accelerating the level and rate of engagement with digital technologies among some of the EC’s most socially disadvantaged citizens. Central to the strategy will be the closer integration of service delivery networks of organisations (such as third sector, NGOs, social or community enterprises) who can act locally with or for excluded citizens.

The OU’s research, led by Ivan Horrocks, seeks to understand and evaluate the effectiveness of the projects and innovations introduced by city partners including, among others, Dublin, Milton Keynes, Rijeka and Reykjavik. www.open.ac.uk/egov4u

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Pervasive privacy As technology increasingly surrounds us in our daily lives, the threats to our privacy have become pervasive too. Research is helping users regain control of the personal information that is rightfully theirs.

The PRiMMA (Privacy Rights Management in Mobile Applications) research project examines how individual users of mobile technology (such as smartphones) manage their privacy in their personal, professional and social lives. Researchers conducted major empirical studies to understand the human factors that determine users’ privacy requirements, and are now developing new privacy-aware ways for users to interact with technology.

Bashar Nuseibeh, OU Professor of Computing, with colleagues at the

OU, Imperial College London and the University of Bath, attracted over £1.2 million in funding for PRiMMA. People are not adept at recalling privacy-sensitive moments, such as changing Facebook status, changing sharing settings and so on. The researchers used simple but groundbreaking ways to help people recall these moments weeks after they occurred using personal memory phrases during interviews. Building on these studies, they have developed new ways to interact with mobile technology, using sound, text and vibrations to receive information, as well as physical gestures to communicate information.

PRiMMA won the Golden Mouse Award for Best Research Video at the 2010 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. http://primma.open.ac.uk

Surveillance and global capital Whether we like it or not, surveillance is embedded in our society. How does this affect the workings of the government and private sector?

Kirstie Ball, Reader in Surveillance and Organisation in the OU Business School, is continuing her surveillance society based research with a project ‘The New Transparency: Surveillance and Social Sorting’. This research looks at the role technology companies play in promoting surveillance internationally – working with colleagues at the Canadian universities of Queen’s, Alberta and Victoria.

A project workshop at the OU brought together academics from across the US, Australia, Canada and Europe, and included a keynote speech from the UK’s Deputy Information Commissioner, Jonathan Bamford.

The research is expected to reveal an emergent picture of how the spread of surveillance in society is deeply embedded in the activities and movements of global capital. The project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada. www.open.ac.uk/new-transparency

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Who is a European?

Creative and inventive claims to EU citizenship mean marginalised and deprived people are creating new European identities.

ENACT (Enacting European Citizenship) focused on how European citizenship is performed by the actions of citizens as well as non-citizens (third country nationals, refugees, illegal aliens, member states). By investigating those who have been marginalised or excluded, ENACT revealed an activist side of European citizenship.

Led by the OU’s Professor of Citizenship, Engin Isin, ENACT brought together researchers from five EU member states (the UK, Belgium, Hungary, Latvia and the Netherlands) and one candidate country (Turkey) to explore in depth how European citizenship is claimed, disputed, built and enacted. The three-year project attracted ₏1.2 million in funding.

The main strands of the project included research on the actions of the Roma (Italy, Germany), Kurds (Turkey), sex workers (Italy, Belgium), women (Belgium, Turkey, Italy), gay youth (Latvia), refugees (Germany, UK, Italy) and other marginalised, excluded and deprived people. A key finding of ENACT research was that claims to European citizenship and rights are enacted in a range of unexpected and unconventional ways, as well as through the courts.

This is an ineradicable part of the development of European citizenship.

European citizenship is a relatively new notion for belonging. It complements nationality but provides broader rights such as mobility across Europe. It is coveted because more people want to exercise these broader rights and freedoms. It is also contested because member states see it as a threat to their sovereignty and nationality. http://enacting-citizenship.eu

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Who We Work With

Here are just some of the organisations we work with...

Industry:

Government and policy:

Research institutions:

AMPAC BAE Systems British Energy Devlin Tracat e2v technologies Microsoft Rolls-Royce SAP SINDRI Group

BBC Dept. of Health DFID Environment Agency Higher Education Academy Milton Keynes Council NHS Transport for London UK Space Agency

CNRS, France Imperial College University College London University of Cambridge University of East Anglia University of Edinburgh University of Manchester University of Oxford University of Sterling

UK/EU: British Academy DEFRA European Space Agency European Union National Inst. of Health Research Research Councils UK Royal Academy of Engineering The Leverhulme Trust The Royal Society

International: Canadian Inst. of Health Research Carnegie Mellon University MIT NASA S.African Inst. for Distance Ed. The Gates Foundation The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation UNESCO UNITAID

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Research dissemination

OU research benefits many sectors. Effective communication of our research findings to the general public, end users and the academic community is a priority. Traditional means – such as journals, books, conferences, newspapers, radio and TV – are vitally important. We are also actively embracing more inventive means to share our research outputs…

Open Research Online (ORO) The OU’s ORO service is a searchable repository of more than 18,500 OU research publications. It is ranked the third best higher education repository in the UK by the Registry of Open Access Repositories. Since its launch in 2006, it has been visited by over 1.6 million people from more than 200 countries. http://oro.open.ac.uk

Research portal The research portal contains up-to-date coverage of OU research activities and related information on knowledge transfer and enterprise activities.

OU linked data The OU’s linked data initiative provides a structured, open and queryable platform for various University resources, including publications, people and places. The OU is the first university in the world to expose its data as linked data in this way. http://data.open.ac.uk

Platform Platform represents the OU community online, uniting students, alumni and academics with informal and engaging content – news, videos, podcasts, blogs, forums, groups and polls. www.open.ac.uk/platform

YouTube The most popular video-based social networking site in the world, YouTube offers another route to ensure that outputs of OU research are disseminated. The material is targeted to a general audience and the wider research community. www.youtube.com/ouresearch

www.open.ac.uk/research

iTunes U The OU continues to lead the way on iTunes U with over 37 million downloads from 370 collections as well as over 360 eBooks. The channel showcases a diverse offering of audiovisual assets representing the broad spectrum of OU research along with course material across the curriculum. www.open.ac.uk/itunes

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OU MILTON KEYNES CAMPUS The OU has its headquarters at Walton Hall in Milton Keynes, UK. Around 1,200 full-time academics are based at the Milton Keynes campus, along with some 350 of our 1,200 full-time and part-time postgraduate research students.

The University has invested significantly in its infrastructure for research, increasing laboratory space at Milton Keynes by nearly 50% in the last eight years. Our newest facility is the Jennie Lee Building, which houses dedicated laboratories for ‘pervasive computing’ and deployment of ambient and ubiquitous technologies.

We also have new laboratories for design, music, ecosystems and geobiology, and atomic, molecular and plasma research. Other laboratories for biomedical, cognitive psychological and environmental research have all been modernised recently.

OU AFFILIATED RESEARCH CENTRES The OU has a number of Affiliated Research Centres (ARCs), both in the UK and overseas, which register their students for OU research degrees.

ARCs may be educational, industrial, commercial, professional or research establishments and include worldrenowned organisations such as the Architectural Association School of Architecture, British Antarctic Survey, and Wellcome Trust tropical medicine research programmes in Kenya, Thailand and Vietnam.

“Over the years our OU PhD Programme and our relationship with the University have seen a constant improvement in our own training skills that has proven to be of further benefit to our PhD students.”

Roberto Buccione, Coordinator, PhD Programme, Consorzio Mario Negri Sud Research Institute, Italy.

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WHY DO OU RESEARCHERS LOVE THEIR JOBS? OU research helps us understand why the world is the way it is, and offers solutions for a brighter, more stable future.

As well as being inspiring, revelatory and ground-breaking, research is open to anyone with an enquiring mind.

…when ‘big ideas’ connect with the making of social and cultural realities.

There is a very personal element to doing research: research changes the researcher.

At the OU, you have access to global knowledge, latest technology, cross-cultural diversity, high quality feedback and a web of open access resources.

I enjoy the creative and social aspects of generating research ideas and running a research laboratory.

OU research enriches lives in so many ways. If my own research makes even a small difference to only one other person, it is worth the effort.

It is through our knowledge creation and dissemination that we are able to push boundaries about what is known.

It’s a chance to get out and talk to people and explore how applicable published theories are to the real world.

I love those moments of recognition, when I suddenly feel I understand someone who lived many centuries ago.

That my research is applied and of value to those working in health and social care brings great satisfaction.

It’s worth it, fighting and waiting for that insight which one of my students calls ‘the woo-hoo moment’!

The OU has taught me about working together. Thank you colleagues and students for challenging me about everything I think.

I feel extremely privileged to work at the OU – its commitment to supporting and advancing research is exemplary.

How cool, to be given time and resources to follow your deep curiosity and find out stuff that nobody has before.

What motivates me is being able to highlight issues and scenarios that governments, international NGOs and policy makers would rather keep hidden.

Research takes me into my happy place. It increases my knowledge and understanding, and feeds into my teaching.

I find it inspiring to add to a body of knowledge from which others can develop new ideas and practices.

I love doing research because it makes me a better teacher!

To read literary texts and to know how they have been read is to have a conversation with some of the most fascinating minds of all time.

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The Open University Walton Hall Milton Keynes MK7 6AA United Kingdom www.open.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0)1908 654411 Fax: +44 (0)1908 655477 E-mail: Research-School-Head@open.ac.uk Produced by the Research School and Communications. Š The Open University 2011 The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (number RC 000391), an exempt charity in England and Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (number SC 038302).

Some of the images used in this brochure were sourced from thinkstockphotos.com

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